On the Great Ma^itodon. 345 



Much has been written of late by inexperienced individuals, 

 containing romantic descriptions of the remains of monstrous 

 extinct quadrupeds, disinterred in various parts of our country, 

 and which are calculated to produce much confusion when they 

 attract the attention of the uninitiated. Thus, in excavating 

 the canal around the falls of Ohio, the remains of portions of 

 several individual skeletons of the mastodon were exhumed 

 from the river banks, several feet beneath the surface of the 

 present soil. Several pairs of tusks were arranged in a circle, 

 within which were the remains of a fire and Indian tools ; va- 

 rious other bones of the same were scattered about this focus, 

 which had no doubt at some distant day been so arranged by 

 the native Indians. A writer in one of the Kentucky papers 

 presumed that all the bones were the remains of a single indi- 

 vidual, vrith its immense mouth filled with enormous teeth, and 

 armed with several pairs of huge tusks, and the whole animal 

 of course sufficiently large to swallow a forest at a meal. 



Another account of a huge animal disinterred at Big-bone- 

 lick, 60 feet long and 25 feet high ! has gone the rounds, being 

 first published in our western papers, republished in those of 

 the Atlantic cities, and finally transferred to those of Europe. 



Of a character somewhat analogous are the descriptions of 

 similar organic remains published by individuals supposed to 

 possess higher claims to science, in the Trans, of the Am. Philos. 

 Soc. vols. iii. and iv. At page 478. of the volume first refer- 

 red to, there is a description of the under jaw of a young mas- 

 todon, with a figure. This relique was found in Orange county, 

 New York, and is now in the New York museum. 



The author of these remarks took an early opportunity to 

 forward plaster casts of this jaw to the Geological Society of 

 London, and to the Garden of Plants at Paris ; and on his re- 

 cent visit to the Jardin des Plantes, he was somewhat surprised 

 to observe that he had already been in some measure antici- 

 pated by a foreign naturalist ; this museum already contain- 

 ing the plaster cast of a portion of the lower jaw of a mastodon, 

 sent from Germany to Baron Cuvier, soon after the completion 

 of the last edition of his Animaux Fossiles. This specimen 

 also contained the inferior tusk, about which so much has been 

 subsequently written on this side of the Atlantic. The circum- 



